Other ASNE Lessons

Rotation Interviewing Exercise
By participating in a structured interview of each of their classmates, students will learn to identify types of interview questions that yield better answers, demonstrate a professional approach when meeting an interviewee, recognize how time constraints affect interview questioning, and recognize the difficulty in getting to source for interview.

Covering a Presidential ElectionA multi-day lesson that asks students to look at presidential debates for issues of interest to teens then research and write articles about what they heard.

Basic Interviewing and Reporting
Basic skills are the foundation of journalism. Improving writing and reporting will impact the quality of the student newspaper. With a clear understanding of basic interviewing and reporting skills, students will gain confidence in their abilities.

Mock (or Shock) InterviewThis lesson plan with help students understand the importance of preparation prior to a difficult interview. They will also recognize the importance of sympathy and empathy. Note-taking, fact-checking and writing leads will also be emphasized.

Mall Trip: Interviewing and Reporting ExerciseA role-playing exercise evolves into a news story. Students play roles of mall denizens and interview each other for individual points of view. A teacher-turned-police chief delivers the press conference.

Interviewing basics and profile article practiceThis lesson gives students information and insight on how to research and prepare before an article, what stellar interview questions are, how to create a conversational atmosphere with their interviewee, and how to use material given to write an eccentric profile article.

Generating Open-Ended Interview Questions
Open-ended questions force the interviewee to explain and talk more — giving reporters more to quote. This lesson asks students to interview inanimate objects to hone their skills at open-ended questioning.

Interview Scenario
This plan hones your students’ ability to listen and ask the right questions. Seven role-playing scenarios allow them to ask questions about a news event and write stories based on their questions.

Oral Histories of World War II
A unit designed to introduce students to techniques of transcribing and conducting oral interviews. By interviewing people who lived during World War II, students will gain an understanding of this generation.

News Gathering and Reporting Tools

“Blottr is a user generated/citizen news service. As citizens upload their (breaking news) stories, journalists can see these stories collected on the Blotter site.”

“Geofeedia allows a user to search and monitor social media contents by location. A user can mark the location they want to gather crowd contents that are uploaded on Twitter, Flickr, Youtube, Instagram and Picasa, and gather them realtime.” Poynter’s News U hosted a webinar on how to use Geofeedia.

“Google Alert provides e-mail updates of relevant Google results (through the web, news, etc.) based on queries that are hand-picked by the user. As such, the Alert can be used to monitor the development of a news story or event. The alerts can be provided daily or as they happen and come in different formats.”

Mention finds keywords or phrases on social platforms. It also scans blogs, forums, videos and images. You can download it as a program on your computer or as a mobile app. You can select the keywords and have Mention alert you, or you can watch a live feed.

Overview is a free tool for journalists that automatically organizes a large set of documents by topic, and displays them in an interactive visualization for exploration, tagging, and reporting.

PANDA is a newsroom data solution that can email you when information that’s relevant to your community and your publication becomes available. It also makes it easy to save data and to subscribe to searches. Poynter’s New U held a webinar on how to use PANDA.